Campaigns

Change the Rules

Australian Unions pushing for a better public services and jobsA big chunk of the Australian Unions’ Jobs You Can Count On Strategy is dedicated to improving public services and the jobs that deliver them. The jobs you count on deliver the public services Tasmanians need.

Find the Australian Unions public sector policy measures below.

a. Restoring government funding for key public services and the good jobs they support.

b. Reversing the cuts to public sector jobs and ending the privatisation of public services.

c. Ending the use of labour hire and outsourcing in all levels of government: workers should be employed directly by government and enjoy the same rights and entitlements as other government workers

d. Ending insecure work in the public sector, in particular the illegitimate use of fixed-term contracts.

e. Ending the imposition of ‘wage caps’ and ‘wage freezes’, which in many cases have limited public sector workers to pay rises that do not keep up with the rising cost of living. The capping of public sector wages also has a chilling effect on wages in the private sector.

f. Ensuring that employers (whether public, non-profit or private) that provide government funded services ascribe to best-practice employment standards (including wages, adequacy and stability of hours and basic entitlements), so that jobs for workers providing these services are decent and secure.

g. Government support for social and community services, including early childhood education and care, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care, must be adequate to ensure fair incomes and security of employment for workers providing these services, which reflects the values, skills and public importance of these jobs.

READ: ACTU Secretary Sally McManus, excerpt from her National Press Club address:

“Working people sticking together is how we counter-balance the power of big business because there is strength in numbers. Because rules alone will never be enough, we also need to stick together with the people we work with as our living standards have only ever been improved with strong unions and unions are only as strong as their members.

Together we can do what generations of working people have done in the past. Let us all remember that at one time nearly all jobs were insecure. There was no weekend, no equal pay for women, no sick pay, no holiday pay and no minimum wage.

Working people did not accept injustice as “inevitable”. We fought unjust laws. We built our unions and built campaigns to change the rules.

And change the rules we did.

Now it is up to this generation of working people. Other generations have shown us the way. It will not be easy. It was never easy. But I believe in the power of working people. And I believe in the working people of Australia. Time and time again generations of Australian workers have come together, stood up against injustice, inequality and greed. This federal Government – and many in big business – will do everything they can to stop us, to demonise us, they want to make this task as hard as possible.

Because they fear the power of working people banding together.

Because when Australians work together, they are mighty and unbreakable.